siliconindia | | Mar-Apr 20178EXTENDING THE INTERNET OF THINGS TO BROWNFIELD DEVICESSuhas D. Joshi, Director, Enterprise Architecture Honeywell International, Inc.T he Internet of Things (IoT) is all about unlocking business value that is locked up in data generated by "things". Consider a smart industrial pump that is used in an oil refinery. The pump generates useful data regarding speed, volume of fluid passing through as well as vibration and noise level of the pump itself. If this data is collected from the pump and sent to an application for analysis, it will be possible to gain insight into data patterns that show the behavior of the pump. Certain anomalies, e.g. a high degree of vibration and noise with normal fluid speed and volume, may suggest that the pump needs to be serviced. If not serviced quickly, it will lead to a disruptive failure. A single averted disruption can save millions of dollars. Because of IoT related technologies such as networking, cloud technology, data storage and analytics, it is now possible to collect and analyze device data at a large scale and generate significant business value.IoT is a relatively recent development. But there are millions of devices, sensors and controllers that were developed long before IoT came along. These devices generate data for "things" such as pumps, rooms or air handlers. Such devices have been already deployed in the field and use proprietary or standard protocols to communicate with other local devices or local applications. The local application resides in physical proximity of the devices, receives data generated by the devices and performs command and control. See the figure below as an illustration of how legacy devices are connected. The automation and control protocols implemented in legacy (or brownfield) devices are designed for a local "site" level communications and control, as opposed to communicating with a remote application that is accessed through Internet. For example, a water leak detector may communicate through a ModBus protocol, a temperature sensor communicates through BACnet protocol and an air handler unit may use LonWorks. Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OA&M) is performed locally and not remotely through the public Internet. Finally, security design assumes a friendly, local, "site" based communication as opposed to communications over The InternetIoT DCPIoT DCPComputeStorage+AnalyticsReportingEngineeringOptimizationPlanningHumanMachineInterfaceHuman Machine InterfaceReal Time ControlWater Leak DetectorsTemperature SensorsAir HandlersIn My Opinion
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